Information drives business. Companies today rely to an unprecedented extent on online, frequently accessed, constantly changing data to run their businesses. Unplanned events that inhibit the availability of this data can seriously damage business operations. Additionally, any permanent data loss, from natural disaster or any other source, will likely have serious negative consequences for the continued viability of a business. Therefore, when disaster strikes, companies must be prepared to eliminate or minimize data loss, and recover quickly with useable data.
Companies have come to rely upon high-availability clusters to provide the most critical services and to store their most critical data. In general, there are different types of clusters, such as, for example, compute clusters, storage clusters, scalable clusters, and the like. High-availability clusters (also known as HA Clusters or Failover Clusters) are computer clusters that are implemented primarily for the purpose of providing high availability of services which the cluster provides. They operate by having redundant computers or nodes which are then used to provide service when system components fail.
The use of virtual machines and virtual machine technology has proliferated in such high availability environments. Management concerns also proliferated with the management and the backup of tens or even thousands of virtual machines. To date the selection of objects for backup has been limited to wild-carded object names and time of last modification. The query language allows selection of object based on any number of attributes provided by that object and the logical combination of those attributes.
However, there exists a problem in that there is no management functionality that can scale with the addition of hundreds of virtual machines or other objects that need to be backed up.